Tuesday, September 29, 2015

Anssi Hyytiäinen interview

1. You, being a pc game designer,
how did you managed to learn and get inspired ?

I started by creating levels for
Doom. I guess it was the first game that had an advanced enough
engine to support some creativity just via using a level editor.
I think the first one I used was called "Waded". I
remember creating some simple levels that we played in deathmatch
mode with my friends. Hmm, I don't think any of my old Doom
levels have survived to this day. That's probably a good
thing.Anyway, I just followed some online tutorials, and tried to
figure out the missing bits myself. Later I transferred to Duke
Nukem 3D editing, and then to Quake when its level editors
started appearing to the internet.Maybe there is some curiosity
value to this little Quake deathmatch map I released back then.
It's called "Minisota", and when I say little, I really
mean little; I thought it would be funny to make an extremely small
deathmatch map, to create extremely hectic action. But it became so
exhausting to play it that I created expanded version of it,
embellished with some tunnels you could fly through and elevators
and hatches... ...which pretty much just made it even more
confusing to play it :D Well, it was "different" at
least.Anyway, by the time Quake 2 came along, there were quite
many little groups starting to form on various level editing
forums, of people creating various mods and total conversions for
Quake, and calling for help. Alex and Jason were calling for help
to build Dawn of Darkness, and I ended up joining them. Don't
really remember how that went down, but with all likelyhood I
must have showed that Minisota map to them...ps, you might be
interested to know that after Dawn of Darkness, I also released
another little deathmatch level for Quake 2, which was originally
supposed to be a deathmatch map for Dawn of Darkness. Now it's a
weird blend of medieval textures and Q2's modern items.I think in
terms of deathmatching the level doesn't really play that well at
all. It's just bad design. It's fairly interconnected, but there are
no large areas in there at all. Mostly I remember that just placing
the visibility planes into the level was a puzzle in itself. Kind
of amusing considering that moder games render perhaps several
thousand times more geometry in single screen than that entire
level had. It was different times...

2. What is your favorite game,
games and genre of games ? I guess you like Doom beside others ?
I myself like Doom, Thief the dark project and System
Shock.

Being a professional game developer, I find it a
bit hard to enjoy games the way they are meant to be played. I
usually end up playing as research, analyzing everything from a
developer's perspective. And also, when you spend your day
developing a game, somehow you don't necessarily want to spend
the evening playing another game... I just rather play guitar
instead :D

But occasionally when a game is good enough, I find
myself actually enjoying it as a gamer. Actually one of the more
recent experiences like that was Wolfenstein: The New Order,
which was directed by another Dawn of Darkess veteran, Jerk
Gustafsson Bethesda Underground: Know Your Devs - MachineGames' Jerk Gustafsson.
I was extremely impressed by that game and ended up playing it
through, which doesn't happen too often. Actually it is only
because I played it through to the end credits that I realized
Jerk worked on that game. I'm that lousy at following the
industry... Anyway, the little rap beats in the cut-scenes are
just genious, I love it when people dare to do something unexpected.
Another case of recent "I actually enjoy this" has been
Witcher 3.Apart from that my "favourite genre" by far
is sim-racing. I used to do some league racing with GTR 2 for
instance. Those races must be my favourite moments of all time in
gaming. And lately I've spent some time just driving around in
Assetto Corsa.

3. Any plans for the future ?

Yes
of course, but I can't talk about them...

4. I myself
consider that gameplay is above the a game graphics. What do you
think ?

Well it depends on the case. There are many areas
in game design where you need to make a choice between function
and aesthetics. Do you want pretty character animations, or
responsive controls? Do you want nice clean screen, or
informative UI? Sometimes there are no clear choices, and what
works in one game doesn't work in another. Sometimes plainly pretty
graphics can be an important part of the intented experience.But,
as a gamer, I think more often I tend to lean towards function.

5.
Do you prefer to get in touch with the gamers/developers in a
comunity or rather work by yourself and/or with your team ?

I
don't usually really seek out contact with the community, because I
always feel like I'm busy enough as is is... But occasionally
when it just happens spontaneously, I don't mind.

6.
Any chance for improvement on your behalf if it is needed ?

My
attitude towards improvement tends to be that I just learn what I
need to learn when I need to learn it. I've never felt it to be
very difficult to learn new things. It's important to have the
attitude of actually understanding what you are doing with some
software and why, instead of just memorizing what you need to do.
When you actually understand the reasons behind things, you will
eventually find out a lot of underlying commonalities behind the
superficial idiosyncrasies of different systems. And eventually
learning new systems becomes fairly trivial.

7. I
imagine that you didn't have troubles with the Dawn of Darkness
team, but going to work on Max Payne was a hard choice ?

No
of course not. Dawn of Darkness was supposed to be possibly a
launching pad for a company, but as it was with all the mod
groups, only few would make it. The publishing side of things
never really took off. The only offered deals were not realistic
at all. I'm somewhat of a pessimist, so I can't say I was too
disappointed. More realistically Dawn of Darkness would operate
at least as a resume for the individuals who worked on it, and
that's pretty much what happened.Sometime after the Dawn of
Darkness demo was released, Jerk Gustafsson asked me if I was
interested of joining Starbreeze in Sweden. I said sure, but I'll
first ask if Remedy is interested of hiring me. I knew they were
building Max Payne, and then I wouldn't have to move outside of
Finland. And indeed they were looking to hire level designers, so
Dawn of Darkness simply operated as my resume.And since then
I've worked on Max Payne 2, the Alan Wake games and more recently
on Quantum Break Quantum Break - Time is Power Trailer not just on level design but pretty much all over the
technical designs of things.

8. What is your favorite
compiler you use ?

If you mean to ask what are my
favourite tools I like to use, it's not really a question of
what's my favourite at this point anymore. I just use whatever
tool gets the job done the best. We use a lot of in-house and a
lot of third party tools, and all of them have their own strong
points and their peculiarities.Back in Quake days I used an
editor called "BSP" which I thought was wonderful. Back
then a large component in level editors was their modeling
capabilities, but that part has become pretty much obsolete
nowadays. Everybody are just using standardized formats and third
party modeling tools. As of actual code or script compilers, we
have our own proprietary script language and compile out the
level scripts from our own world editor. That might also become
obsolete in the future, and perhaps we will create level logic
directly with C++ interfaces.

9. Any advice for a newbie
game programer, beside learning by himself ?

Well one idea
to develop one's skills overall, whether you are a programmer or
game designer or artist, is perhaps to play around with Unity.
Mostly because it allows you to quickly get a feel of various areas
of game development fairly independently, without getting too bogged
down with tiny techical details right at the start. On the other
hand if you just use something like Quake or Unreal level editor,
your creativity tends to be somewhat more constrained than it is
with something like Unity.

As of advice specific to
programmers, I would say it is very important to develop your
skills also in understanding the realities of game design, and of
all the other departments of game development. As a programmer it
is easy end up too focused onto the details, and kind of miss the
big picture. Especially in complex projects.

10. Do you
prefer lan or online gaming or none ? I myself prefer multiplayer
over single player. A single player game must be real good to be
played. I switched to this some time ago.

Well since I
mentioned sim-racing, definitely multiplayer there. But then if I
play something with the consoles, I tend to not bother with the
multiplayer side of things. A well made single-player campaign is
easier to just play bit by bit at my own pace. I can't say I
would prefer one over the other.

11. What you rather
try not do to, in developing something ?

There are plenty
of things I would avoid, but I'm not really sure what this
question means... Sorry!

12. Can you give any advices to
the Quark editor team, who developed theyr editor for a multitude
of games, beside Quake 2 ? They are a good team who are always
improving and learning from others.

I've never used Quark
and I don't really know much about it... Sorry again!

13.
And one final question, can you tell me something about your
involvement in Quake 2 Dawn of Darkness developement ? What
editor did you used than and what is a .bru file ? A .mrg file
(which by default i don't know who can opened it) can be renamed
as a map file and used by Quark.

These are files used
by BSP editor. I can't really remember the details but I guess
mrg stands for merge, and could be used to save out and load in
portions of a level. I think .bru files may have been the same idea.
BSP used the concept of prefabricated components, meaning you
could build a little collection of entities and save it out into
a "prefab" library, to be reused multiple times in
different levels. I suppose pretty much all the editors nowadays
use the same concept in one way or another.My involvement
with Dawn of Darkness was to implement a lot of the level logic,
basically script in the triggers, the monsters, the conversations
and the logic with which the game proceeded. I think I ended up
implementing pretty much all of the logic you find in the final
demo, because when we finished it pretty much all the other level
designers had already moved on to other things, as it was pretty
clear the thing would probably never get published in any
commercial form. I also built a fair bit of the level geometry,
especially towards the end as there was no other people left. The
best looking bits in there are still probably built by other
people though, as I was definitely not the most skilled when it
came to building the environments.One thing in particular I
remember designing and implementing carefully was all the
conversations that occur during your quest to get into the Cheitan
Keep near the village. It was originally written down in a rather
traditional manner, where during a particular point of your quest,
only particular characters would actually tell you something that
would help you out. This is somewhat common still because of the
linear way game story scripts are usually thought out, even in
non-linear worlds. Screenplay writers are not very good at
thinking in terms of possibility spaces, they just rather focus
onto maximizing the drama. This often creates a situation where
the player is somewhat uneasy about what to do, and he is just
trying to speak to everyone randmoly until the correct piece of
dialogue finally pops out and the story proceeds.In DoD, when
Roarke is doing all the tasks he needs to do to get into the
Keep, I decided that at any point of the quests, the player could
ask about any relevant quest item from any of the characters in
the world. And most of them would be able to at least point you
to someone who should know the answer. So if the player had been
told he needs a shovel, he could trust that he was able to
actually ask about a shovel from any friendly face he ran into.
Even if the NPC didn't know the answer to your question, at least
Roarke tried to ask. It's a very simple thing to do, but very
very often overlooked in story design.For those interested of
creating DoD levels, if you look at the various text files for
2_2, you will find that for the NPCs, there's pretty much the
same set of questions for everyone, just onlocked by the flags that
represent the player progress in the story, meaning every single
character had these questions unlocking the moment the player
became interested of that particular item, and the player could
go to anyone at any point to ask about any interest point.

Me, my brother, all Quake 2 and DoD players out there, EricBoyceU from moddb (ericboyce1), the whole gamers out there and
in behalf of Quark editor team, i thank you for your answers, help and files provided
and i hope many people learn from your experience about pc games and
programing.

You may not copy from this blog my words, videos, images in any sort of way, without asking me first to give you my approval. You can post in english or romanian language. All of this are, in part, within Quake 2 Dawn of Darkness total conversion, trough a fantasy setting. The romanian moldavian part is added because is where i live and the history theme with the turks.We are not affiliated in the past and present with any of the game company, and neither are we own one.

The present and future map making and modding we will make and upload, with my brother (we work on modding under the username Roarke here and Roarkes on Moddb site, and helping each other), will only be available in the moddb, this site, freesound and soundcloud.

My thanks go to the original team, Ward Six Entertainmentand the uploader Toadeater and EricBoyce1 (Dawn of Darkness 1.2 Text Mod).

For anyone who wants and post in this blog, refrain from talking bad about other countries, culture, religion, politics etc. and avoid flame war. We all want to learn something in our lives and don't hate each other.I hope you will find here interesting things :)

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